I ♥ Jon Brion
An Existential Composer Finds His Home at Huckabees
In a town where tunes can be terminally hip, Jon Brion might be the craziest, and smartest, musical Avant-Gardist out there. Leaping between instruments and styles with the verve of a one-man band, Brion's music is pure Looney Tunes brilliance, a carnival where wonky percussion, lush themes, and rock-folk rhythms create the most distinctive film scores in Hollywood. From Magnolia's somber orchestral repetitiveness to the aggressive percussion of Punch-Drunk Love, and the time-bending musical effects of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jon Brion's scores push the psychological and sonic envelop.
Where many film scores are homogeneous, Jon Brion's music demands to be noticed. Beautifully at points, surreally at others, and sometimes just plain savagely. Love it or hate it, Brion's music has the kind of unique strangeness that makes you wonder what the hell you're listening to -- as opposed to just receiving a calm musical brainwave. It's a talent that serves Brion mighty well when it comes to scoring I ♥ Huckabees (available on Milan Records), an existential comedy that might leave any other composer scratching his head. But not Jon Brion, who's gone for the eccentric gusto once again.
Jon Brion is the Alice through the looking glass of Hollywood's film composers, each film getting stranger and stranger, curiouser and curiouser. Starting with Hard Eight's relatively straightforward tale of two Vegas hustlers, Brion's work for director Paul Thomas Anderson has dealt with Magnolia's tapestry of mad coincidences and the romantic insanity of Punch-Drunk Love. Going outside of Anderson's hemisphere with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Brion played a relationship regressing through time.
Now with I ♥ Huckabees, Jon Brion teams with the equally offbeat director David O. Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Spanking the Monkey) for this surreal gumshoe story. To try to sum up what might be the most bizarre major Hollywood release since Videodrome, Jason Schwartzman plays Albert, an econerd who hires "existential detectives" Dustin Hoffman and Lilly Tomlin to make sense of the coincidences that fill up his pathetic life. Albert's gradually drawn into their client base, a circle of addled misfits that include a disillusioned fireman (Mark Wahlberg), a conniving department store publicist (Jude Law), and his frantic wife (Naomi Watts) who's the eyecatching model for the Huckabees chain of department stores.
With not much in the way of a linear plot, Huckabees is more like a string of surreal incidents, whose participants try to figure out the meaning of life. Such as it is. And Brion's music is there at every strange turn to get into their subconscious with a mind-bending miasma of a classical piano playing, a blasting Wurlitzer organ, and contemplative accordion among the score's seemingly endless instruments. Whether he's playing them like a silent movie accompanist on mushrooms, a cool jazz detective, or singing the title song with the sound-alike magic of Paul McCartney, I ♥ Huckabees' score is a delight for the mind and the senses.
A native of New Jersey, Jon Brion's talents as a multi-instrumental arranger and singer started him off in the rock and alternative scene, where he's played with Macy Gray, Elliott Smith, and Robyn Hitchcock. Brion remains just as active in this arena, producing albums for Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, and Aimee Mann while managing to sell-out L.A.'s Largo cafe on Friday night for eight years running -- all while currently rushing to finish the Huckabees album.
Indeed, watching Jon Brion work his magic at Largo's improvisational show is like seeing an eager, mad-scientist child who's been given a stage full of wonderful toys that he can't wait to play with. But for all of his music's complexity, Brion's melodies have a simple, child-like innocence to them. There's always some kind of melody to his madness. And now having just made his Huckabees deadline with a few hours of sleep to spare, Jon Brion talks about his distinctively strange and beautiful approach to film scoring.
Venice: Do you think that your music's style has made you the "go to" guy for quirky films like I ♥ Huckabees?
Jon Brion: I wouldn't consider my music overground or underground. I just want it to have an emotional and intellectual accessibility. And because scoring a movie is such a time-consuming matter, you're doomed if you don't like the film. So I've just taken films that I've liked.
What kind of director does it take to work with you?
If I'm interested in a movie, then it means someone is trying to do something different to begin with. And that means we'll get along, however strenuous the job is. When you come on a movie, it's been this guy's entire life for two years. And this is the last chance to make any creative difference in their own movie. And even though it might not be reflected budget-wise, music is a huge part of how the movie comes off. l think people like Bernard Herrmann are the proof of that. He's intrinsically part of the tension in his Alfred Hitchcock films. Try watching some of the scenes in Psycho without his score, and it's amazing how little tension there is in them.
Would you describe yourself as being an "existential" composer?
I hadn't thought of that! [laughs] But then by description, I think we all are "existential," whether we want to admit it or not. We're all stuck in this crap. And I'm certainly not interested in making "standard" music. So by nature of what I do, my music is Avant-Garde.
How would you describe your music, or do you think that's even possible?
Hopefully, I can't describe what my music sounds like. I'd certainly say my scores are different in terms of what you'd call "movie music." That's part of the fun, because it's more interesting to find music that will juxtapose with the movie, yet still be part of its life force. The first film I did was for Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight, which I scored with Michael Penn. A lot of it was a 1950s jazz organ trio, done in the style of Booker T. Washington. The score also had a bunch of "sound scapey" things in it. Then I did Magnolia, which was composed in an extraordinarily dense, highly repetitive "classical" style. Punch-Drunk Love had modernistic and weird percussive pieces, mixed with light, old-fashioned French-style chamber music. My score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn't resemble any of that, and I don't think I ♥ Huckabees is like anything else I've composed. So I don't think I'm looked at as a person with a "fixed" sound.
Do you think there's an almost childlike sound to your music?
I'd say it's the sound of arrested adolescence, but a well cultivated arrested adolescence!
How did you find your style?
My dad was a conductor, so there were a lot of different types of music in the house. So I naturally gravitated towards becoming a musician, and was driven to be self-taught. It was never conscious. I just knew that I wanted to play a lot of different things. I took up the piano, drums, and the guitar. Soon, my parents spotted that I was going to be a lifer for music, and they knew there was no way around it. All parents want their kids to survive in the world, and my mother advised me to find some other interests. So I took her advice to the letter, and made sure that I had something to fall back on. I concentrated on writing music in case playing instruments didn't work out, and also playing around with tape recorders, since I'd always had an interest in the technical aspect of sound. But even though I had the opposite reaction of what my mother wanted, what I did was exactly what she intended in the long run -- which was to educate myself about everything musical that I could. I made her advice work for me.
With so many instruments that you play, would you also consider yourself a one-man band?
I'm interested in the overall experience. There are people who want to be known as songwriters. But to me, writing songs is just symptomatic of my more global interests. To me, doing things is what's interesting. So it's not like I want to be known as a multi-instrumentalist.
There's the sense that you're making it up as you go along with your scores, particularly with I ♥ Huckabees.
I'm a devoted improviser. And, in essence, anyone who composes is improvising. But how much they allow that sense of fun to be retained is another matter. There's a surrealist attitude that says if you completely, and utterly let go, then there's going to be this information that's going to come out of your subconscious mind, which will be far more complex than something you would consciously create. I absolutely agree with that, because you have a vast amount of brainpower that's going on when you're creating something. So when I compose a film, I want to do it with the director. I just want to sit in front of a keyboard, with a guitar and improvise while he watches, like I would if I was watching a silent movie. Then the challenge becomes figuring out how to attach myself to the director's nervous system.
I ♥ Huckabees is sort of a detective movie as well as an existential comedy. How did your music try to hit both approaches?
There's definitely a bunch of Henry Mancini-style cues in the film, especially in the scene where the detectives are going through the trash at Jude Law's house. That's something I picked up right off the bat when I watched the film. I felt there was a weird sense of Technicolor fun to Huckabees, like you'd find in the early Pink Panther movies. And I ♥ Huckabees has a combination of a mock-serious tone and goofiness, which is a very interesting balance to have going.
Was that your general direction for the score?
It was one. All of the directors I've worked with have a similar sense of experimentation. And with David O. Russell's movies, I didn't see someone who was trying to just be a director. He has points he's trying to get across. And most people who are of that mind tend to be very open to experimentation early in the scoring process, until they finally sift through the music later in the game. When we started Huckabees, everything was up for grabs. Its first temporary score had a lot of solo classical piano pieces. Then I had the idea of using a plaintive, human voice in the score. That would tell people who thought of Huckabees as being a pure intellectual exercise that this story was in fact about a very "human" thing, which would be conveyed by the music's voice. So David took my comment and put a lot of opera into the next screening, when I was thinking just the opposite. Opera's use of voice is very dramatic, and takes center stage. For Huckabees, I was thinking about voices becoming the sound of humanity, which would be going on in the background, in a very gentle way. Suddenly, I thought, "Oh, I'm writing an opera!" It would've been fun, because I don't know much about opera, and I'm not specifically a fan of it. That approach would've made I ♥ Huckabees unlike any score I'd done. When it came time to actually score the movie, I'd written some pseudo-classical piano pieces. Dave and I sat in front of a grand piano for two days. Then he said, "I just want a lot of good feeling." And I thought, "Wow." I usually have to neutralize too much feeling when I'm playing, because directors will often say, "I didn't put that emotion there. What's that music doing there?" Now I had the opportunity to talk to David about something that had been bugging me, which is that soundtrack music has become emotional wallpaper. They're tuneless affairs, and the songs are gratuitously put in to sell the record company's other bands. There's something about really having songs being intrinsically part of the movie. And my favorite scores like The Third Man used just a single instrument to create these great songs. I also loved the great, tuneful scores that Henry Mancini wrote. David was completely open to my ideas. So I asked him for ten minutes to take myself out of film composer mentality, and to put myself into songwriter mode. I started playing one-finger melodies that I'd been working on for my record. Then it was the classical moment of a director saying, "What's that? Let's watch it to picture." And immediately there was the juxtaposition that David and I were looking for. And better yet, the songs were right on with what was happening in I ♥ Huckabees. Those melodies became the film's soundtrack. It's crazy that it even happened that way.
There's a definite Beatles sound to your voice, and the songs you've done for Huckabees and Punch-Drunk Love.
I don't actively try to sound that way, and removed elements from my songs that would compare me to The Beatles. But I finally had to acquiesce to the fact that sound is part of my mode of expression, from the sonics to the feel. If you write a truly melodic song to a rock beat, and God forgive you if it has guitars, then the song ends up being Beatle-esque. At this point in my life, I don't feel like hiding those impulses anymore. But what's really embarrassing is that people think I'm trying to be that way. If I really was, I could probably sound better than most of the bands that run around trying to sound like the Beatles. It would be a cakewalk! While that kind of deliberate emulation is easy, it's also nothing to be proud of.
There's a wonderful cue in Huckabees where you play a bike "chase" like a silent movie pianist would. But here you do it on a Wurlitzer organ.
That moment in Huckabees is very much a silent movie chase scene, which cracked me up. But it's so fucking ridiculous because it begins when Mark Wahlberg tries to stop the detectives from chasing Jason Schwartzman. So what does he do? He puts a bicycle in front of them! And no one is even chasing Mark and Jason when they ride away. That made the scene one of my favorite moment's to score. And I'm a big fan of silent movies, which was an inspiration for bringing the mighty Wurlitzer into Huckabees. I realized there was an instrument built 80 years ago to accompany movies. It had all the power of an orchestra, plus sound effects. Few people have used the Wurlitzer in a score since talkies came in. But everything you need for a movie score is in this instrument.
Your music can sometimes be akin to sound effects. Can that be dangerous when you've got so much going on with the dialogue and visuals of your films -- particularly when you're working with P.T. Anderson?
I'm not responsible for the sound mix in any of my films, and Paul Anderson tends to mix things louder than I think they should be. He likes it when people have to strain to hear the dialogue. And what he achieves from that is something that affects your physiology. His films push you to the edge, which is right where he wants you.
But do you want to be confrontational in how your music plays with the film?
I think like Paul Anderson; I'm interested in breaking up the way people are scoring things. And I make that self-evident. Stuff of mine jumps out in ways that movie soundtracks aren't supposed to do. You could call it inconsiderate. But I view it as causing some kind of juxtaposition with the film that's interesting. Remember, there's nothing in any film that I've scored that wasn't okayed by the director. It's always their choice. I have nothing to do with whether the music is too loud or too soft. But I'll try and subvert the current "rules" of what film music's supposed to be, whenever it's possible. I think there's an original truth about what a movie score is supposed to do, which is to keep you engaged with the movie, and to give it a sensibility. I learned that from Paul. He's so gifted in understanding the marriage between sound and movies. And when I say sound, I mean everything, from the way the dialogue's recorded to how he plays his music with visual images. I think Paul's sensibility is heightened above any other person who's making movies today. He's much more concerned with the music giving you a complete sense of experience, so that it stays in your head. Paul's not trying to be realistic, because what you think of as being "realistic" in a film isn't realistic in real life. People don't hear subtle string music going on all the time, which is what happens in fucking movies. So if you want to be real, you've got to hit people on all levels of their senses. Paul sees movies as complete sensory experiences. So if he doesn't want you to hear the dialogue, then it's for a reason. And I think that approach is beautiful, poetic, and cool. It's way beyond how directors normally work, and I've always trusted Paul because of that. When he hears something that I do that he likes, then that's the way it's going to be, and it's not going to change. That's special, and I've carried Paul's sense of audacity into my scores. But whatever amount of audacity is in there, it's not to spite the picture. It really isn't, even if it seems that way to someone at first. But the more they watch the film, then they'll see the music has more merit to the image than something that would follow the film scoring rulebook.
You've scored these completely eccentric films like I ♥ Huckabees. But if someone asked you to do a "mainstream" score, would you be interested?
As a creative person, I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. But if something came along, and the challenge was to do something that was completely standard, yet still remain interesting, then that would be great fun for me. But it would have to be at a particular moment in my life, and it would have to be a good film. I'm not against "popular" films. I have no aversion to success, and in fact, I take films because they'd be interesting for other human beings to see -- never mind if my music was in it or not. There are moments when, culturally, the things that are popular are the things that are good. Say the George Gershwins, Hank Williams, and Bob Dylans of the world. Or look at the filmmakers in the 1930s and the 1970s. People were making artistic, groundbreaking films like The Godfather, which was hugely successful, as well as good. I think that the people I work with are informing the language of movies. And one of these people at some point is going to make a film that's going to be more than semi-popular. Take Paul Thomas Anderson. He's going to be more than an acknowledged taste. He's going to explode. And that will be great, because he's a bad-ass who deserves it. I'm a pissed-off moviegoer. I've kind of stopped going to movies, because I'm sick or paying money to go to see dumb movies that can't hold my attention for even a second. I mean, who do we go and club? Who's making this crap? It's awful! So for now, my choices are based on something being an "outsider" movie.
But don't you think your scores, and their movies show that there's hope for the left-of-center to make it in Hollywood?
Well, I think there's always hope in this bleak-seeming world. At some point, I, or any of my compatriots, might do something that becomes wildly successful. And everyone in the business will say, "I always loved those guys!" I hope that I ♥ Huckabees isn't automatically marginalized. David O. Russell is taking on big issues that people aren't able to talk about, for fear of sounding pretentious. And this movie deals with big things in a plain-spoken way, which is why I'm so attracted to it. Huckabees could have come off like a first-year college student talking about Franz Kafka. But instead it's this sweet, endearing thing that talks about the conundrum of existence. This movie isn't so much to swallow as people might think, and I hope they find out how entertaining I ♥ Huckabees is. I hope that audiences find the entertainment value of Paul Anderson's movies in that way. And I think it will happen. So is there hope? Ab-so-fucking-lutely!
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